How a hacker, some oil-funded pundits, and a credulous press undermined decades of climate research.

From the "hockey stick" graph to the hottest decade on record, a timeline of how Climategate really went down.

1988

NASA scientist James Hansen tells Congress the agency is "99% certain" record-high global temperatures are due to human activity.

1990

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its first report (PDF), predicts that without a significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, the world will warm 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade in the 21st century.

Phil Jones, who heads the CRU, confirms the email theft. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR run stories quoting portions of the emails. The Telegraph's James Delingpole picks up the term "Climategate" from the skeptic blog Watts Up With That? A few weeks later, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) says the emails are evidence of "scientific fascism."